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See you there!

Walkabout Paris

Took a long walk, saw the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, and went to the top of the Eiffel Tower.



























































I did a lot of walking, plus I took the stairs when I got to the tower, so I was pretty tired and hungry. I had planned to go to the Pied de Cochon, which is a reastaurant that Nathalie's father started, and despite having looked up the address before leaving the hotel I couldn't find it, so I stopped at a pizza place and got a pizza and a huge beer.

Au revoir, Mas Carlot!

Hellooooo, Paris. Haven't had much to report the last few days as far as work is concerned. Mostly just moving wines around, pulling the ones that had finished malo off their lees and putting them into clean cuves. It's been bitter cold in Bellegarde thanks to the Mistral, which can take a day that's just a bit cool and make it utterly freezing. Wore 2 sweaters and a scarf to work most days this week.
Thursday night I drove back to Mouries to say goodbye to the Cartier family, and have dinner with them and their importer.
Friday night I finally got to make dinner for Cyril and Nathalie, unfortunately with all the cleaning and packing I was doing I ended up pressed for time, and the potatoes came out under-cooked. Dammit.
I've been wearing all the same clothes for nearly 2 months now, and most of the stuff I brought with me was stuff I knew I was going to get wine all over anyway, so I gave a bunch of my clothes and my boots away to one of the Moroccans, who seemed pretty excited about it. Despite getting rid of some clothes my bags are still too full though. I think it's all the wine and salt.
Anyway, now I'm in Paris and I'd love to stay here blogging all day, but I've got some touristy crap to do!

Ok, French road signs suck at giving directions

So, Bellegarde is a somewhat confusing little jumble of traffic circles and one-way streets, and I've been trying to figure out a shorter way to get from the center of town back to home, because my current route takes me straight into town, but then I have to take the long way out, past another traffic circle, and it's like an extra 2 miles to get back to the road where Carlot is located. So today, I tried following the sign from the center of town that points to Nimes, which is the basic direction of Carlot, but the route took me north of the road I normally travel on, then on a loopy path ending back at the traffic circle I was trying to circumvent. It was in fact even longer than the route I usually take that ends at the same traffic circle. So the sign in the center of town should in fact be pointing in the direction of the route I've been traveling the whole damn time.
So, that being said, today was pretty mellow at work. Putting things away, moving a few things around. I did draw the short straw for decuvage and spent an hour or so shoveling grape must, and I'm cultivating some pretty sweet blisters on my right hand. I also washed the bungs on all the red barrels. The process itself is not that interesting, however 'bung' is a funny word.

This is a bucket of dirty bungs.






This is a pyramid of clean bungs.





We also did some fining today, which is a process I've touched on before where something is introduced into the wine to attract the heavier particles and make them fall out of solution. Sometimes it's done with egg whites, which offends some vegans. In this case it was done with a pair of chemicals, one introduced and mixed into the wine, and the other mixed in about a half hour later. Not all wines have to be fined, but press wines are cloudier than free-run juice, and since the quality of the press wine this year is high enough to potentially end up in the final blend, it needs to be fined to bring the clarity level up to par with the rest of the wines.

On an unrelated note, I've decided to start studying for the Court of Master Sommliers' Certified level exam, with the goal of taking the test in November. That means a lot of studying between now and then. Today's little bit of info: Chilean wine regions from north to south; (all valleys) Elqui, Limari, Aconcagua, Casablanca, San Antonio, Maipo, Cachapoal, Colachuga, Curico, Maule, Itata, Bio Bio, and Malleco. My mnemonic device: Everybody loves a chicken sandwich. My cousin can consume many. I'll buy mayonnaise.

Drivin' around weekend!

With just about a week left in my fabulous winemaking adventure, I figured I'd better make sure I see as much of the area around

me as I can. So Saturday I drove to Beaucaire, which is about 20km NE of Bellegarde, just down the Rhône from Avignon. It's a pretty little town, with lots of touristy things to do.


Unfortunately I didn't know exactly what those touristy things were before I came. I looked on the tourism board's website, but I generally find it's better just to go to the tourism office and ask. Unfortunately that only works if they're open. I took this picture with my watch next to it. 'Samedi' is Saturday, the day I was there, so this would seem to indicate they are open from 9:30 to 12:30, then from 3 to 8, and as you can see from my watch, it's just after 4, and they're not open. What I missed was the conditional sentence above the time, which I didn't understand at the time, because I didn't know what Pâques was. It's Easter. What it says is, the tourism office is only open Saturdays from Easter till the end of September. Shoulda come last week.

So I ambled about for a bit, and stopped off in a cafe to write in my journal. The only other person in the cafe was this man. I don't know how well you can see in this photo, but he has only two teeth, and one of them is gold. Bling bling, Monsiuer, bling bling.

After a bit more wandering I stopped at another cafe. I was trying to find some of the many touristy things that I know must exist so close to the center of town, but one of the rough bits about French architecture and city design is that damn near everything looks alike. So, at the second cafe, I noticed again that it doesn't seem like French bar and restaurant employees are strictly required to be nice to all the patrons. I didn't see the whole story, so I'm not taking sides here, but what I saw was as follows: A family with children was sitting out in front of the cafe. A girl who looked to be about 3 got up from the table and went inside unsupervised, where she grabbed a handful of sugar from a table where some men were having coffee. The waiter/bartender stopped her, took the sugar away, chided the child, and yelled at her mother. The mother yelled back, and the child returned to the family. Weird thing is, the family didn't leave at this point. I didn't understand all of what was being said at their table, but I'm pretty sure she said something along the lines of 'I don't care what he says, he's just some prick who works in a bar.' A few minutes later the girl walked in again unsupervised, the bartender yelled at the mother again, this time he definitely asked them to leave, she said 'we're going' and they left. I paid and left as well, because I was sure I wasn't going to get anything more entertaining out of that place.

I walked around a bit more and did manage to find one of the touristy spots. Apparently this village is known for eagles, and they have some sort of Renaissance eagle-show in the old fortress at the top of the hill. Unfortunately I missed the last show of the day. Perhaps I can give it another go this weekend before heading to Paris.

So, yesterday I went to the beach. They had a specially designated areas for dogs to poo, so you know I had to take a picture of the sign.





I wend to a village called Saintes Maries de la Mer.
I swam.
The water was wonderful and warm, although there was a bit of a breeze in the air.
Also a very touristy village, and with the beautiful weather, and it being potentially one of the last really nice days of the year, the place was bustling.

All the restaurants were open to the street, and all of them serving paella and fresh seafood. This area is also in the Camargue, which is well known for salt and horses and bulls and honey and rice, so most of the souvenir shops reflected the theme.


I was wandering around town and saw some sort of tourist attraction, and I didn't know exactly what it was, only that there were people up on the roof. I found the door and it was only two euros to get in, so I checked it out. Turns out the walking on the roof was pretty much the whole thing, but the view was amazing.

Today was pretty mellow at work. We drew the press juice off the mourvedre skins so it can be de-cuved tomorrow. We're still in the process of putting everything away for the winter, today we put a bunch of the hoses and pipes in the storage room. The Moroccans are still working on end of season maintenance on all the harvesting machines. Just about all of the wines are finished and we're working on getting them in the cuves where they'll rest for the next few months.

Language lessons

So, it's not uncommon for somebody to say something to me and for me not to understand one or two words that are being said. There are some regional dialect issues from time to time, for example the word I'd learned at Gourgonnier for 'hose' was 'tuyau,' which the dictionary defines as pipe or tube. Here they also use the word 'manche' which the dictionary defines as 'handle,' which can be confusing when they use the same word to refer to a hose as to refer to the handle of a shovel.
So, today, Nicholas was trying to tell me to do something, the conversation went something like this:
Nicholas: Can you take 1 kilo of tartaric acid and put it in cuve 33 in a (word I don't know)
Me: A (word I don't know)?
Nicholas: (word I don't know) like women wear
Me: What?
Nicholas: Like woman's underwear, you know?
Me: I put on woman's underwear?
Nicholas: No, you put the acid in the (word I don't know) like women wear (mime running hands up and down leg)
Me: I don't understand.
Nicholas: Come here, I'll show you.
Me: I'm scared.
(we walk into the lab, Nicholas pulls a stocking from a box)
Nicholas: This is a stocking.
Me: Oh! A stocking!
Nicholas: You put the powdered acid inside, and put it in the top of the cuve.
Me: Ok, I understand. I thought you were asking me to do something very gay.

I also went to Bressades with Cyril today for tasting and to see the winery. It's a bit smaller than Carlot, they have about half the acreage in vines, but it's very cleverly arranged, with all the metal cuves for primary fermentation on top of the concrete ones, so the grapes are pumped in, then the wine is fed by gravity into the lower cuves when primary fermentation is complete.
It's almost dinnertime now, I was supposed to go to Nimes with Cyril and Nathalie, but their babysitter got sick, so we're eating at their house.

Long day.

Just got done working and it's 7:45. The last hour and a half was mostly waiting though. We tasted through tanks with Alain again this morning, and made some more blending decisions. These decisions basically led us to moving around what seemed like all of the wine in the winery. All the pumps were active, and several moves were in the queue. Jordan, Nicholas, and I have been waiting for the last hour and a half for the last cuve of press wine to finish pumping onto the Mourvedre skins. Since it was the last to finish fermenting, and since the Mourvedre generally has the most punch to it, and since the press juice seems to far like it's good enough to maybe end up in the final blend, we're adding all the press juice to the Mourvedre skins to try and get them a little more complexity.
With all the wine moving around there was a lot of sanitizing to be done too. Normally the pumps and hoses are just rinsed with water, but at this point we're dealing with some wines that are going through, or have finished malo, and some that aren't done with primary fermentation yet. As we've learned previously, the bacteria responsible for malolactic fermentation can go after the sugars in the wine and raise volatile acidity, so it's very important to make sure the wines are completely finished with sugar fermentation before they're exposed to the malo bacteria. I also learned that there's a visual test for malo; wines that haven't gone through malo have a very purple color to their foam, while wines that have gone through malo have a white foam. This distinction of course applies only to red wines, and it also explains why most sparkling red wines, such as Australian sparkling Shiraz, and Italian Lambrusco have such intensely purple foam.
Also, the mosquitoes seem to be back in force today. Dammit.

Bugs in your wine.

Provocative title, eh? Too much? I'm not trying to gross anybody out or put them off wine, I'm really just trying to give people a realistic look at where the things they eat and drink come from. All wine get some bugs in it, I firmly believe this. The harvesting machines bring in crickets, snails, grasshoppers and the like with the grapes, and flies and bees are attracted to the sugar and you can't help having a few of them end up in the fermenter. Now, all of the wine's going to go through multiple stages of settling and filtration, so it's not like you're likely to find solid evidence of this by the time the wine reaches your glass, I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that there is no such thing as vegan wine. You might now be thinking, 'but isn't all wine vegan, not counting the bugs?' but sometimes wines are fined, a process that helps clarify it by introducing a protein that will attract heavier particles and cause them to settle to the bottom of the barrel, and one of the preferred options for fining is egg whites. Some vegans have objected, saying this adds animal matter to the wine. Now, I'm not trying to step on anybody's veganism, I'm just saying that if you object to about one egg white per hundred litres of wine, you might just want to skip wine, because egg whites or no, there's probably been some snails in there too.

So, that being said, check out this picture. We de-cuved inside today, which is more complicated than doing it outside, where the press moves back and forth between the cuves, and it's really pretty easy. To do it inside, first we had to jimmy-rig the conveyor, hanging from the straps there, so the wine could be shoveled onto it inside the cuve, then carried out. The thing is, then it had about 4 feet to fall from the conveyor to the auger that pushes it outside, so there are 3 buckets, a mess of plastic, and one Moroccan in charge of making sure everything that falls ends up in the auger. They also had a brilliant solution to the sometimes-the-must-is-too-dry-to-move-easily problem. We installed a pump from the cuve that holds the wine coming out of the press, going back into the box with the auger, this way they were able to pump the wine back into the circuit when necessary, making it flow easier. This also made it a lot easier to fill the press, since the more liquidy the must is, the easier it flows into all the hard to reach corners.
Oh, and also today, I got a speeding ticket. Funny thing is, I didn't drive today. Apparently they do that take a photo of your car and mail you a ticket thing, which eats because I'm pretty sure I could have done the stupid lost American act if I'd actually been pulled over, and gotten out of it. And it's not even my fault, I was going 99kph in a 90kph zone, which is really pretty good considering the speedometer on the car doesn't work. Funny thing is, the ticket didn't actually come to me, since it's not my car, it came to Nathalie, so now she's got to send them a photocopy of my driver's license with a letter saying "I lent my car to this speed-demon American, please don't deduct points from my license."

You have to be kind of a renaissance man/woman when you work in a winery.

You can't exactly stop everything and wait for the plumber or electrician to show up when something needs to be fixed, so everybody needs to know a bit about everything around here. Today I disassembled and reassembled the plug to a pump and the cuve lantern, and rebuilt the end of one of the hoses. Here's Cyril taking apart the control box on the jimmy-rigged conveyor belt.

My pants are also filthy, because I cleaned lees out of three cuves, so my jeans are covered in purple.

Today was another day of intricate ballet, with all pumps in operation, moving wine from this cuve to that one, inside and outside. Between yesterday and today we sent off 2 full cuves of finished wine from 2008, which Nathalie had sold to a negociant. We took all the rose that was still varietally segregated and consolidated it into 2 or 3 cuves. When the cuves are being filled with juice, somebody has to keep an eye on them from the top to make sure they don't overflow. You can get kind of seasick doing that, watching the bubbles on the surface of the wine move below you. It's like staring into the ocean at night.

We're in the process of pulling all the Syrah off it's must and consolidating the various vineyards together, which is a big process since there's more Syrah than anything else. We've got the Moroccans working outside, emptying one cuve, and meanwhile we're pumping the free-flow juice that went from that cuve into cuve 19 overnight into the cuve where it will rest for a while. The whites as well are being pumped out of varietal segregation and into their various blending tanks, as are the pinks. Many times since I've been here we've found ourselves standing about, waiting for something else to be ready to get done. Today was the first time we had to stand and wait for the pumps to be done with what they were doing so they could be moved on to their next task. By the end of the day, we had literally every single red wine hose in the winery in use, and even had to wait a few times because we didn't have enough double-male joints to couple them all together.

We also went about the process of taking apart various bits of equipment that won't be used again until next year. We cleaned and disassembled the whole receiving area for red grapes, and I even got to drive the forklift to take the stem bin over to the garage for storage. Forklifts rule.
By the end of the day I think I must have gone up and down the stairs at least 50 times. Last time I was in France I gained 10 pounds in 2 weeks due to excessive wine and cheese consumption. This time I don't think I've gained a bit, may have even lost weight, and I'm pretty sure those stairs are to thank for it.

My legs hurt now, and I have a new episode of Heroes to watch. Goodnight all.

Last day of harvest again!

Also, today I finally figured out what the deal is with the shopping carts at the grocery store! I had previously figured out that the carts aren't kept inside the store, but upon finally figuring out that they're kept out in the parking lot, I thought they were a rental-type deal, because you have to put a coin in them to detach them from the rest. Turns out the system is just to keep them from getting stolen, because when you take it back to where it belongs, you get your coin back. Pretty smart system now that I understand how it works. Keeps them from getting stolen, and makes sure people put them back where they belong.

Today we received the Cabernet, which was the last thing still on the vines, so as of tonight we are fully harvested.

This morning we also tasted tank blends with Alain, this time of white and rosé. We tasted through the various possible blends of the finished tank wines to decide on blends for the Tradition Blanc and Tradition Rosé.

Despite being done with harvest, there is still a lot of work to do this week, with all of the Syrah cuves still needing to be pulled off their must. It was an intricate ballet of pumps in the winery, taking juice out of one fermenter and into another, and assembling the white and pink blends we'd decided on during the morning tasting.

I spent about a half hour managing a yeast overflow situation when the yeast that was to go into the Cabernet was prepared too early. When you're getting yeast ready to go into the cuve, you mix it first with hot water, then a little later with some of the juice from the cuve it's going into. You let that all sit in a bucket for a while, then dump it into the cuve. Here's a picture of just one bucket of yeast for a smaller cuve. The problem is, once the yeast gets active, it starts to foam up like crazy, and often overflows the bucket it's in. In this case we were doing yeast for one large cuve of red, plus the rosé of Cabernet that was pulled off of the larger cuve, so we had 4 buckets of yeast going, and we ended up needing to wait to pitch it because not all the grapes were in yet, so all the buckets started to foam over. The foam will go down if you stir it a bit, but in this case there was so much I ended up having to dump it all into a bigger bucket, and still had to fight with it to keep it from spilling all over.

I didn't have an Champagne at my house, but I opened a bottle of Chateau Guiot Les Jumeaux Chardonnay with the guys in honor of the end of harvest. After that I went to the grocery store, which is when I finally figured out the shopping carts. I also learned an important lesson about reading labels. I was in the beer and soda aisle, and on the beer shelf I found something that looked like a store-brand beer called Panaché. So of course I had to buy it, because just the idea of Albertson's brand beer made me chuckle. Also, it was very cheap. However, I opened one after dinner and realized I hadn't gotten what I was expecting. After reading the label, I realized that I had bought something vaguely akin to a non-alcohol hard lemonade. A sparkling lemonade with less than 1% alcohol. Is it gay if I mix it with rosé and drink it anyway?

Chateauneuf du Pape!

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting at a pizzeria called La Mule du Pape in the village of Chateauneuf du Pape. It's about an hour northeast of bellegarde. The landscape is the first dramatic difference you notice when coming from the Costières de Nimes to Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The Costières is all pretty flat, and it gets a lot more hilly when you get north of Avignon. A lot rockier too. The area is known for it's distinctive rocks, typically the size of a fist, which absorb the heat during the day, and hold onto it overnight. I went to visit Yannick (the guy who was working here, who I thought was named Nick the whole two weeks we were working together) and to taste his dad's wine, Domaine Eddie Feraud. The family has 4.5 hectares, a very small domain, and they make just one cuveé of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
We visited the vines, which are northeast of town on mostly sandy soil, and are mostly very old. They're also all goblet pruned, which means they're not trained into a trellis system, all of the plants are free-standing. This is in part because they're so old, and that's the way all the vines were done in this area in years past. Most young vines in this area are pruned this way too however, which is because machine harvesting isn't allowed here. Most harvesting machines, at least the ones I've seen here, are only compatible with trellis-trained vines. Everything is hand-harvested here, which also contributes to the drastic difference in price between Costières de Nimes and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Nick also explained the extensive work that is done in the vineyard during the year, with meticulous pruning and green harvesting, to get higher quality grapes at harvest.
There are 13 varietals allowed in Châteauneuf; 5 white and 8 red, with Grenache at the top of the food pyramid.

I tasted 2006 and 2007 from Eddie Feraud, which were very old-school, concentrated and powerful, with no new oak or barrique. The two wines were consistent with my experience with these two vintages from this area, with the 06 being lighter and more supple and ready to drink, while the 07 was pretty monstrous and, while drinkable, my preference would be to lay it down for at least 5 years. I also went and tasted at Domaine Durieu, Yannick is friends with the winemaker there. They're a much bigger operation, with several cuveés of Châteauneuf including a white, and some Côtes du Rhône and VDP wines. Their tasting room was much more fancy and formal, and the wines a bit more new world. Again, the 07 Châteauneuf was monstrous. They were also selling 2001 Côtes du Rhône for 6 euros, so I got a bottle of that to take home.

I walked up to the actual Châteauneuf, which is basically just a few old walls, though it used to be a full castle that housed the Popes of Avignon in the 14th century.





I also took a drive northeast of town to visit Clos du Caillou, but unfortunately they don't have a tasting room so I didn't get to go for the tour.

Painting barrels and whatnot!

So, today started off pretty slow, not that much to do. Quick remontage in the morning, pulling samples and the like, then Jordan and I were assigned to paint the red barriques. Not everybody does this, it's just an aesthetic choice, but Nathalie wants them to look nice. The thing is with barrels, there's really no way to avoid dribbling on them at least a little bit, and sometimes a lot. This is no big deal with whites of course, because they don't leave a stain on the barrels. Reds do, so you can either leave them like that, with random drips and drops on each of them, or you can actually buy ones that are already painted red down the center, or you can take the lees out of a cuve that's just been emptied and paint the barrels with a sponge. That's what we did. The winery had an eerie feeling while we were doing the painting. He and I don't chat much when it's not work-related, and there were no pumps going like there usually are, the only noise was the door that refused to stay open or shut, and kept banging every time there was a strong gust of wind.
The afternoon was on track to be slow like the morning when Cyril and Nathalie arrived with an urgent change of plans. It seems that the volatile acidity in the cuve of pressed syrah was climbing, which it shouldn't, and it needed to be pumped off it's lees immediately, or the v.a. could climb above acceptable levels by Monday. All wines contain some volatile acidity, but if it gets out of hand it can ruin the wine. In this case it had started climbing because the bacteria that are in charge of malolactic fermentation had finished their job and apparently gotten bored, so they went after the small amount of sugar still left in the wine. Unlike the yeast, which makes alcohol out of sugar, the bacteria turns the sugar into v.a., so the wine had to get off it's lees and get stabilized asap. This is one of those times when being educated as enologists works in Cyril and Nathalie's favor. Were it not for her education, Nathalie may have missed the significance in the change in v.a. on today's analysis, and had she waited for her next meeting with Alain, the level could have risen too high.
I planned on celebrating the end of the work week with a steak, but I couldn't find good meat at the grocery store, apparently you have to go to the butcher, so tonight I'll be having a burger and fries and some Enfants Terribles.
Oh, and watching last night's episode of The Office.

No power.

The lights just came back on.
Today at work we did a fair bit of the usual, but we also put together one of the vineyard blends. All the Grenache and Syrah blends have thus far been kept in separate fermenters. Today the Syrah blend that will go into the Tradition Rouge Grenache Syrah was assembled. After we pulled samples of all the finished Syrahs Nathalie, Cyril and Alain tasted through them, and blended them in various permutations until they arrived at the final blend. It's 50% from the Blanche vineyard (each of the kids has a vineyard named after them. Blanche, Eugene, and Olympe are all Syrah, and Achille is Grenache. There are other named vineyards on the property too, I haven't asked where those names come from.) 25% is from the Bergerie vineyard, and 25% from the Carlot estate vineyard.
I was dealing with wicked allergies all day. I had previously thought that I was allergic to sage, in Boise, but I don't think they have sage out here. I've had itchy eyes, runny nose, and sneezing all day. Normally when I feel this crappy I want comfort food, so at lunchtime I drove to the grocery store in Bellegarde for chicken noodle soup. The store, however, was not open. The close for lunch from...wait for it....12:15 to 3pm! Now I understand closing for lunch. A lot of people do it around here, and honestly I think Americans should do it more. What's getting me is the time thing. First of all, who the hell gets 2 hours and 45 minutes for lunch? Second, why the odd time frame? I get 3 hours, I get 2 and a half hours. Did they do some market research that told them there's a big shopping rush between 12 and 12:15?
So I had lentils and leftover chicken for lunch.
We finished assembling the syrah in the afternoon, and before going to the store I decided to finish watching Zach and Miri Make a Porno, which is an awesome movie. Even Jason Mewes was pretty good, and he's basically Kid Rock without the questionable musical talent. The power apparently went out while I was watching it, which I only noticed because my computer stopped charging. First I thought my power converter had crapped out, but after trying multiple devices in multiple outlets, I finally figured out there was no electricity.
I went to the store and bought chicken noodle soup and candles, then got home and realized I couldn't cook the soup without electricity, so I reheated my lunch over some tealights and had a romantic candlelight dinner for one. One of the Morroccans came over to ask me about the electricity. I told him I didn't know what was going on, but I gave him a handful of tealights because they didn't have any candles in their quarters. In return he gave me some fresh mint from the garden for tea, which seemed like a fair trade.
Now the power's back on and it's my bedtime.

Juice bath!

Nicholas is still out of commission with a back injury, so at present it's just Jordan and me in the cave, with Nathalie coming by regularly to give us instruction. First thing this morning we gathered tank samples for more tasting by Nathalie and Cyril to decide which tank to empty tomorrow, and where to put it. We're also still dealing with cuve 7, which is a syrah with stuck fermentation. We've got 2 small fermenters with the lees from the white cuves trying to get it working, and this afternoon we pumped a few hectoliters of the mourvedre that's just finishing fermentation into the syrah cuve to try and get it working.
Jordan and I started the debourbage of the clairette that came in Monday. That's the process of pumping the clear top juice out of the cuve, leaving behind the heavier junk at the bottom. What I didn't know was that it's very important in this process to never stop the pump, because stopping the pump lets the wine in the hose fall back into the cuve, unsettling the settled heavier bits at the bottom, and mixing them back up with the clear juice. So, Jordan was up above, and I was down below with the pump when he started shouting something to me. It's hard enough to understand what's being said to you in the cave with a noisy pump running, to say nothing of the language barrier. I stopped the pump to ask him to repeat what he'd said. Rather than repeating it, he told me not to stop the pump, so I turned it back on, and again he started trying to tell me something. Again I stopped, and again he told me to turn it back on, so finally I turned it back on, and went up the stairs to ask what he was on about. He was trying to tell me to prepare a bucket of water to clean the pump when we were done, and then he told me why you should never stop the pump during debourbage.
The result of the whole debacle was that we had much more cloudy juice than we should have, so it wouldn't fit in the small cuve we'd planned on putting it in. By this time Nathalie had come around, and had gotten the story from Jordan. I had a feeling that his version of the story put the blame fully on me, and whether I was right or wrong she was definitely irritated, and we both got a telling off.
At this point the cuve that wasn't big enough for all the heavy bits was completely full, and we were about to move it all to a bigger cuve. I was up above to pump the juice out of the too-small cuve, when Nathalie accidentally pressed the button on the pump, causing the too-small cuve to overflow, showering me with grape juice. I proceeded to pass the rest of the morning in a decidedly ill humor, now having cold sticky grape juice dripping down my back and into a number of places I prefer not to have grape juice.
Lunchtime came, we finished moving the white juice around, and I got to have a shower, which cheered me up tremendously.
The afternoon was devoted mostly to cleaning and getting the cave ready to empty the marc out of cuve 32 tomorrow, and possibly receive the cabernet. I was assigned the task of cleaning 2 drapeaux. I can't think of an English word for them, drapeau literally translates to curtains, but these are big metal things with water tubes through them that are used to cool the cuves during fermentation. The rough part about cleaning them, especially when they've come out of a red cuve, is that they're covered with tartaric acid, which is deceptively difficult to clean off. You start off with a hose, and some of the bits just flake off, making it seem like the job's going to be easy as pie, but then you learn that the bits that didn't just flake off are holding on for dear life, and you've got to use some manner of caustic cleanser that's so nasty you have to wear gloves just to handle it.
And that was the second major chemical event today. The premises were also sprayed for mosquito abatement, which is awesome. But it does speak to the issue of organic farming in winemaking. I make the point quite often to customers that there are a great number of winemakers who adhere to organic or sustainable practices, but who don't get certified because they want to keep their options open. This is a perfect example. There is no organic option for taking care of a major mosquito problem, and even though in this case the spray was only dispersed on the areas of the property where the grapes had already been harvested, this treatment would have nullified an organic certification if Carlot had one.
At this point I'm keeping one eye on cuve 19, which is being used as the receptacle for the juice from cuve 32, which is to be emptied tomorrow. It's emptied by gravity, which means cuve 32 is just sitting with an open faucet, with a hose leading down into cuve 19. The danger here is that one never knows exactly how much juice one will get, so there's the possibility that cuve 32 will overflow cuve 19. So I'm checking it regularly while I watch Heroes.

Tasting day again!

First thing this morning we pulled samples from all of the tanks and all of the whites in barriqe for tasting with Alain the enologist. The barrel samples of white were interesting, you have to kind of use your imagination, knowing that they will be mixed mostly in small percentages with the tank whites. The rose tanks are great, and I can't wait to taste them when they're complete. The red tasting was interesting too, we were considering which tanks were best for the Chateau Paul Blanc Syrah, which sees more time in wood, and which would be better for the Enfants Terribles and the Tradition. It was particularly interesting because Cyril and Nathalie didn't entirely agree with Alain on the blending, so after he left they pulled new samples of all the red tanks and tried blending them again in various permutations until they'd decided which ones to put where.
I'm off to the store again. I've been wearing the same clothes for a month and I'd really like to have at least one nice shirt to wear when I'm not working.

More white grapes and remontage

We got in the rest of the clairette today, and pumped it into a cuve to settle. The juice that came in Friday had been sitting over the weekend, to allow the heavier material to sink to the bottom of the cuve. The good juice on top was pumped into a new fermenter today to start fermentation, and the thicker stuff at the bottom went into the two cuves of mourvedre.

The mourvedre is getting a lot of pumpover time to extract color and help it through fermentation, it should be done with primary in a couple of days. It was mostly just me and Jordan in the winery today, so when Nathalie told us to do the pumpover for maximum aeration, Jordan got a little creative, here's the picture. The wine on the ground surrounding the bucket gave me the impression that this wasn't necessarily the best way to do it.
There were an obscene number of mosquitoes today. All the water we're moving through the winery for cleanup and whatnot makes for perfect breeding conditions for them, and unlike the mosquitoes that I'm used to, who come out generally in the early morning and the evening, the French seem to have developed a supermosquito that could give a rat's ass that it's hot outside, and will eat you alive regardless. I'm very itchy.
We also pumped the remaining finished marsanne and roussanne out of the cuves in order to gather all of the lees to be used to help along a cuve of syrah that's currently stopped fermenting.
After work I went to the grocery store, and I finally figured out why I can never find a shopping cart. Bags are also hard to find. It seems the French have decided that the best way to make sure everybody remembers to bring their own bags when shopping is just to not have bags at the checkout. I'd seen shopping cart return in the parking lot, and I'd seen people with carts in the supermarket, but I'd spent the first five minutes of every shopping trip so far looking for carts at every entrance, with no luck. It turns out they're not free. You have to put a one-euro coin in the cart in the cart repository in the parking lot to free it from it's fellows. Or find one that somebody else didn't return to it's resting place. So that pretty much eats, but at least now I know.

Paella!

Went to Guiot yesterday for the end of harvest paella party. Paella is a traditional dish in this area, and it's typically made with a combination of seafood; fish, mussels, shrimp, etc, as well as chicken, rabbit, and sometimes sausage.
We had a great meal outside, with plenty of Guiot rose. After eating we played petonk, which is the French version of bocce ball. It's played with one small ball, which is tossed about 5 meters from the players, and each player has two larger balls, and the goal is to be closest to the little ball. It's a fun game, although I did have to serve as the official smack-talk translator between the Australians and the Frenchmen, which is no easy task.
I got lost on the way home because it was dark, and the road I'd come in on was one-way, so it ended up taking me twice as long as it should have to get home, but I made it.

A few fun new ways to spend money!

I finally got my laptop back which, for the new hard drive, labor, and tax cost me about 130 Euros, which is just shy of $200.
Wednesday I went to visit Alex and Numa Cornut at Chateau Guiot. Alex ended up occupied fixing a tractor out in one of the vineyards, but I tasted through the wines first with a French woman named Sylvia who works there. Then Brendan, one of two Australians currently working harvest there showed up to tell her there were customers there to taste. However, Brendan speaks about 2 words of French, and Sylvia speaks about 2 words of English, so I had to translate. I'm not sure how Brendan and the other Australian get along here when Alex and Numa aren't around normally, but that must be tough. I still feel intimidated doing new things when I'm not sure if I'm going to understand what's being said, and I'm told I speak quite well.
So Brendan took me through tasting some tank samples, and some barrel samples of 2008's, then Numa arrived, back from helping his brother fix a tractor. Numa and I had a very interesting chat about the influence of Robert Parker, and what Numa has noticed as a decrease in Americans' preference for extremely oaky wines. He gave me a few bottles of Guiot wine, and invited me to an end-of-harvest paella party today, which I'll be going to as soon as I finish writing this.
I left there just about 6:30, and I was about 17km from Nimes, which meant I'd be able to make it before the computer shop closed, but they hadn't called yet, so I didn't know if it was done. Still I decided to give it a shot. I tried calling as I drove, but there was no answer. I tried again, and again, and finally somebody picked up at about 6:45, just as I was entering the city. The computer was not ready. I turned around and headed to the gas station next to the grocery store, which was the closest one I knew of. I had tried to buy gas the night before, but apparently the '24 hour' gas stations here only accept French bank cards after the attendant has left for the evening. Despite having a sign with Visa and Mastercard logos, the machine wouldn't take my card. I was starting to get worried. I had just under a quarter tank. I drove back toward home, and on the way stopped again at the station I'd tried the night before. This time there was a woman working in the booth, and she told me to use Mastercard I just had to fill up and then pay her on my way out. I filled up and paid. It will be a long time before I complain about the price of gas in the US. About 33 Liters of unleaded cost me over 50 Euros. I left the gas station and the car started to klunk. I had put the wrong gas in the car.
The real irony here is the fact that I've been making a real effort, and doing a very good job at making sure I know exactly what I'm being asked to do at work. I'd say I typically understand 50 to 75% of the actual words that are being said to me most of the time. Sometimes more, but I'd call that the average. Now, through inference and reading body language and just generally knowing what's going on in the winery, I'd say I know what I'm being asked what to do on the first try 80% of the time. When I do have to ask for clarification it usually just takes asking once to figure out the meaning of whatever words I didn't understand.
So that's why it's ironic that I didn't perform the retrospectively seemingly elementary step of asking what kind of gas to put in the car I'm using. I'm sure it's due in fact to the fact that I've never put anything but unleaded in any car I've ever drive. Also, the fact that I was desperate to get some gas in the car.
Needless to say I didn't make it very far, and thank god I had a cell phone. Cyril came and picked me up. We tried to siphon the unleaded out of the car, but the car has anti-siphoning technology of some sort, so we left it and Cyril called a mechanic the next morning.
In the end it was all ok. Apparently a diesel engine, though it won't run on unleaded, won't be harmed by having unleaded in it, while an unleaded engine that gets fed diesel is well and truly screwed.
The real bummer for me at the time was that it put a damper on what had been a pretty awesome day for me up to that point. I did decuvage (shoveling grape must out of the fermenter) in the morning, which is rough work, but I was no worse for wear, and was proud of myself. It's like being in the garbage smasher on the Death Star, but it's full of really thick mud and you've got to shovel your way out. We prepped two other fermenters to receive Mourvedre Thursday, and Thursday afternoon we bled off the rosé, which I hadn't gotten to see before. The rosé is made using the saigneé method, which means the red grapes go into a tank, they're allowed to sit for a while to extract color. How long depends on the grapes. In this case, the Mourvedre sat on the skins for about 6 hours before being bled into another fermenter.
Also on Wednesday, Cyril came over from Bressades to borrow some wine. He has a cuve of white that had stopped fermenting. There are a few ways to deal with this, and one is to introduce some wine that is still fermenting vigorously. We've done this once here at Carlot already. We had a tank of Syrah that had stopped, so after emptying a cuve of Roussanne that had just finished, the lees were left in the cuve, and the Syrah pumped in. Today, Cyril took about 5hl of Marsanne that was fermenting well to add to his stuck fermenter.

That's all I've got right now, and I have a paella party to get to.

Sulfur stinks.

Last night I found out that I hadn't correctly understood the way we're using gravity flow to empty the finished cuves into cuve 19 (aka The Cuve Under the Stairs). I had thought the cuve being emptied was just opened in the morning, but it's actually opened the night before and allowed to drain all night, that way the must is essentially pressed under it's own weight, and it's relatively dry by morning.

I'm working with 3 other guys here: Nicholas is the one in the middle, he's the foreman essentially, he's in charge when Nathalie's not around, he has a wife and a daughter and they live on the west side of Nimes. He has invited me to dinner sometime this week to meet the family. There is also a Nick, who is on the right here, his family has a tiny 4.5 hectare place in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. And on the left is Jordan, who comes from Burgundy, and whose father has a place in a Burgundian appellation I'd never heard of before. So that's the team.
This morning Nathalie gave the Morroccans a break and had Jordan empty the cuve, and since most cuves take 2 pressings to empty, Nick got the honors in the afternoon. Tomorrow morning is my turn.
Today I also added sulfur to a wine for the first time, which smells a bit like lighting 1000 matches and then sniffing the smoke. After nearly adding way too much because I confused milliliters with centiliters, I got the job done. I thought it important to note exactly how much was used too, considering all the hubbub out there about sulfite allergies and whatnot these days. I used 150ml of an 18% solution in a 35 hectoliter tank, which works out to about 0.000007714258%, or roughly 0.07 parts per million. Later I found out that sulfur is actually added at several different points during the winemaking process, but still, even if they put in ten times as much by the time the wine is done, that still only makes .7ppm.
Anyway, we've got everything cleaned and prepped for tomorrow now, and I've got to go grocery shopping. I'm out of baguette, and it just wouldn't be very French of me not to have baguette in the house. I think I need cheese too, come to think of it. Here's hoping my computer is finished tomorrow!

Bullfight!

I drove to Mouriès today for lunch with Eve and Yves. It's really not that far, only a 40 minute drive, and it's remarkable how different the landscape is. The Baux de Provençe area is in the Alpilles mountains, which aren't really big mountains at all, they're more like granite foothills, but definitely make for very different growing conditions. Eve made a tomato tart for lunch, with pastry crust and cheese and tomato and herbs. I need to try that out when I get home. I picked up the couple of things I had left behind at Luc and Lucienne's house, and some wine to give to Nathalie and Cyril, since Nathalie gave some to Eve the day she dropped me off here.



This weekend was the Green Olive Festival in Mouriès, so I went to the village to check out the party. It's also bullfighting weekend here, and apparently churros are a big thing this time of year or something because every food cart was selling them. There were also street vendors with all sorts of regional products, organic produce, and pretty much anything you can make with olives or olive oil was for sale, proudly marked as having been made with local oil.
There was traditional dancing and costumes, and I don't know if this guy's unibrow was part of the costume or what, but it's nice, right?










There was also bullfighting, and since I knew that they don't kill the bull during the fight around here, I went to check it out. The way it works here is, there are about 15 guys (here at least, I don't know if there are more in bigger arenas.) and their job is to grab 2 strings that are tied, one each at the base of the bull's horns. There are two different jobs it seems; some of the guys are actually trying to grab the strings, others are just trying to get the bull's attention, kind of like rodeo clowns, but no goofy costumes. The arena is all stone and concrete, then about a meter inside the arena there's a fence that goes all the way around the inside, so when the bullfighters are being chased, they run and jump the fence to get away, and of course the closer they come to getting gored in the backside, the more the crowd cheers. They jump really high really fast, and it seems like a really impressive display of agility, but as Cyril pointed out later, having a pair of horns pointed at your ass is pretty good motivation.


It's kind of hard to catch on film, but in the picture here you can see one bullfighter running from the bull, jumping, and almost kicking me in the head, then another comes from the other direction to take a swipe at the ribbon.


Unfortunately even though they don't kill the bull, the thing they use to try and grab the ribbon is metal, it looks a bit like a brush you might use on a horse, and one of the bulls must have caught a scratch above the eye, and as soon as I saw the animal bleeding that sort of spoiled it for me. It was about time to go home anyway. I grabbed some frites at one of the food booths and hit the road.


I got home about 7:30, so when I went to drop off the wine for Cyril and Nathalie I was invited to dinner. We had rabbit, rice, salad, and cheese. It was quite nice. I got to formally meet the children, although they were all on their way to bed. The oldest is Blanche, then comes Eugène, the boy I met last night, then the second daughter, Olympe, all three of whom look like their mother, then the youngest, Achille, who looks just like his father.


Now it's bedtime and I have an upset stomach. Perhaps the unrefrigerated mayonnaise I had with my frites was a bad choice.

Surprise visitor

So, I step out my front door and have one of those creepy horror-movie moments when, in the dim twilight, I see the silhouette of a small blonde boy standing in front of the fountain across from my door, looking at me. It quickly turned from a creepy horror movie moment to a cute French kid moment when I realized it was one of the Marès children (Eugène, I learned later), who was feeding the fish in the fountain. It then changed again, now from a cute French kid moment, to an American who's speaking gibberish moment when, after saying hi, I meant to ask if he was feeding the fish, but got the word wrong and instead asked if he was feeding the peaches. He was confused.
I tasted tank samples with Nathalie and Cyril and the enologist Alain today, which was very interesting. The wines are of course very young, but each tank has a disticnt character already. We tasted the press wine too, which was pretty good. No rough or vegetal character that can often spoil the taste of press wine. They don't decide right away what to do with the press juice, they wait to see how it is, and if it does taste good that's a bonus, especially in such a low-yield vintage.
We finished work early and I went to take my computer to the repair shop in Nimes. The good news is the hard drive is a relatively easy fix, and not too expensive. Bad news is I lose all my pictures since my last backup, which I think was September 9th, so that eats.
It's also bullfighting weekend in this region, and of course the repair shop had to be 2 blocks away from the arena, so I parked the car about a kilometer away and walked. I did want to stay and check out the festivities, but I had left the car on a curb and I wasn't entirely sure it was going to be there when I got back, so I figured best not to dawdle. It was still there. I went to the grocery store again to get everything I've forgotten so far, and to activate my cellphone since I don't have a computer for the next 5 days.
I drew a couple of ideas for a patisserie/sandwich shop with a speakeasy-style bar in the back that I've been tossing around in my head.

I almost die, and my computer skips the 'almost'

Yesterday started out standard; remontage, battonage, delestage, etc. Nathalie invited me to have lunch with her and Cyril, which was lovely. We had omlettes. It seems like eggs aren't so much of a breakfast food around here. On my way back to work I stopped at my room and saw that my computer was frozen, so I restarted it and went back to work. A bit later, it was just Nicholas and I, and he had to take a couple of samples to the office, and after finishing the tidying up I was doing when he left, I had nothing to do, so I went to check the computer, which was now giving me the Blinking Question Mark File Folder of Death, which generally means that either my OS has been corrupted or my hard disk has failed, and either way almost certainly means all of my photos for the last 10 days are lost, because that was the last time I did a backup.
After giving up on the computer, I went back to the winery, but Nicholas still wasn't there. I had nothing to do, but I knew Cuve 19 needed to be emptied because it had just been pumped out, and I was apparently feeling proactive. The problem is, carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and the door to Cuve 19 is the lowest point in the cellar, so it's always a bit of a dodgy place to hang out. There is also a lot of CO2 in the cuve, which comes rushing out as soon as it's opened. So I opened the door and it turned out there was more wine left in the cuve than it had looked like from above, and it came pouring out the door. Having forgotten to bring the remote control for the pump, I ran up the stairs to turn it on, but it didn't pump fast enough and the wine was already overflowing the trough below the door. I ran back down the stairs and directly into a cloud of CO2. My heart already racing, and adrenaline pumping, I found out what it's like to breathe and breathe but take no air. I just managed to get the door shut when stars started popping in front of my eyes and my vision started to blur. I had stopped the flow of wine, and I went for higher ground. It took me a while to recover. Meanwhile, Nicholas had returned, and when I told him what happened he explained that's why you never, ever empty a cuve alone. He pointed out that if I hadn't been able to get above the gas in time, we might not be having this conversation. I passed the rest of the day in less than prime condition. I was very preoccupied about the computer, and still shaken up, and it turns out it really does take quite a bit of my concentration to understand and speak French.

This is what a cuve full of CO2 looks like just before you open the door and it tries to kill you.

After work I told Nathalie about the computer, she let me use one of the office computers, and she called a computer repair place in Nimes for me. They were open until 7, and it wasn't yet 6, but it was in Nimes, which meant I'd have to drive myself, and I'd never driven in France before. It also meant I'd have to talk about computers in French, which isn't exactly a strong department of my French vocabulary. Still, there was nothing to be gained from waiting, so I set off. Driving in France is exactly as disconcerting as riding in a car in France. The roads are too narrow for comfort and you feel you're going too fast because your speedometer says you're doing 80, and you can't do the math in your head fast enough to figure out that's only like 45 or 50mph or something. But even when you think you're going way too fast, you get passed by some dick on a loud motorcycle doing 120.
Nimes isn't that far, and I made it to the computer shop to find they don't support Apple. They gave me the name of the place and directions. It wasn't far, but it was near the center of town, by the bullfighting arena. Ironically, the only part of town I'm at all familiar with. The streets are more confusing and the traffic is worse nearer the center of town, and I got lost. By the time I got my bearings it was near 7, and it was raining. I decided to bag the computer store and try again today. I'm on my way as soon as I finish typing this entry. I turned around and went to the Casino. Casino is the grocery store chain in France. They come in all different sizes, there are little ones in the villages, then there are gigantic, mall-sized ones like this one. It's basically like any large grocery store in the states, but with a way better bakery and cheese selection. But no peanut butter. Also, the beer selection's not great by Northwest standards, but still better than you find most places I've been to. I remembered to buy honey, tea, baguette, beer, pastisse, almond syrup (pastisse and almond syrup is my new favorite coctail, it's called a Mauresque, but I'm not sure I'm spelling that right.) chicken, detergent, socks, shampoo, herbs, pasta, olives with anchove, sausage, and lentils. I forgot olive oil, nail clippers, and something else, I think. Good thing I'm going by there on my way to the computer store.

My ipod works at least, but I wish I'd loaded Rosalie onto it. I'd really like to listen to that song.

Pumpovers, yeast food, tasting juice.

I got to taste juice from several tanks that had just barely started fermenting, it was my first time tasting that many different juice samples all at the same time, and the first time I've been able to detect distinct differences between samples of what's basically still just grape juice. I tasted syrah from two different vineyards, one was much less extracted than the other, so it got additional pumpover time. Nathalie likes to do most of the work early in the fermentation cycle, and once the wine nears the end of primary fermentation she prefers to leave it pretty much alone. I tasted one roussanne and two marsanne tanks. The roussanne was very pretty, rich, and very floral. The marsanne was more reserved, with more minerality and some banana bread character to it.
We're doing longer pumpovers than we were doing at Gourgonnier, both for additional extraction and to help kick off fermentation. We're also doing something else that I keep forgetting the word for, I think it's debranchage, it's essentially a more aggressive version of pumpovers, where nearly all the juice is drained out of the cuve, in this case it's gravity-fed into a concrete cuve below the floor of the winery, then it's pumped back into it's original cuve, which breaks the cap up more than just regular remontage, and gains additional color and extraction from the grapes. We also did the second step in a process called 'pied de cuve' which is an attempt to re-start a cuve that has stopped fermenting. About 5hl of juice is pulled off of the stuck tank, and 5 pulled off of another tank that's fermenting very rigorously, and they're put together in another fermenter overnight, which lets the happy yeast from the good tank start going after the sugar in the stuck tank. Today we pumped the whole 10hl into the stuck tank, and tomorrow we'll find out if the whole process worked.
Most of the harvesting here is done by machine, and I got to have a look at the harvester today, it looks like a monster truck with teeth. I'll try to remember to get a picture tomorrow.

First day at Mas Carlot!

The rainy morning was a perfect for the sad goodbye I bade the Cartier family this morning. Fortunately they're not far away and hopefully I'll have the time to visit them while I'm here at Carlot. We took the long way getting here, stopping in the Camargue region, which is in the delta where the Rhône river splits as it approaches the ocean. It's not more than a half hour drive away, but a pretty different climate, much wetter. Eve's uncle Pierre has a winery there, the wine is vin de pays appelation, so he has a lot of leeway with what varietals he grows, he has some grenache, mourvedre, merlot, a few hybrids, roussanne, etc. He also grows rice. The region is known for honey, rice, horses, bulls, and apparently mosquitoes, as my numerous bites can attest. They're not like Idaho mosquitoes, who are rightly too ashamed of their miserable existence to show their faces in the fully light of day, and only come out in the early morning and evening. These Camargue mosquitoes will eat your face off at high noon if you're not careful. Not far from Pierre's vineyards, there's a wildlife preserve. I can't quite find the right word in English, it's not quite a marsh, but it's not quite a lake. The French word is 'etang', which the dictionary translates as 'pond', but it's much bigger than a pond. Click here to see it on the map.
We drove part of the way around the etang, we saw some of the famous horses and bulls, and flamingos! Yay! I'd never seen flamingos before. After that we went to a grocery store on the outskirts of Arles, and I found out that French people DO have malls! However, their gigantic, Wal-Mart sized grocery stores have a much better cheese selection, and you can buy a whole rabbit, head on and everything!
So, we arrived at Mas Carlot about 2:30 in the afternoon, I got my stuff settled. I'm staying in a little apartment with my own kitchen and everything, so the downside is I won't have dinner with the family every night like at Gourgonnier, but I can cook all my own food, and I can eat in my underwear!
I'm already very excited about all the new things I'm going to learn here. Mas Carlot has about 75 hectares of vines, compared to the 44 at Gourgonnier, so the operation is much larger, and the winery is proportionately bigger. They've got some fancy high-tech gadgets that I'll describe as I begin to see them in use. They've also got concrete fermenters, which is pretty traditional in this area, so that's something new and fun too. They have stainless fermenters too, as well as a lot more barrels than they use at Gourgonnier. Today I did some battonage, which involves a metal rod with sort of a half-propeller on the end, which is inserted into a full barrel, and used to stir up the lees. This is done to add body to white wines. It's pretty much the exact opposite of what's done with the white at Gourgonnier, which is taken off its lees pretty early, to preserve the very clean, crisp character. Battonage makes a white richer and rounder, and is most often done with chardonnay, although I completely forgot to ask what varietal I was batton-ing this afternoon.

Ok, that's it for this exciting installment. Stay tuned for more, now I'm gonna go make myself some chicken for dinner!

Last day at Gourgonnier

Last day of work at Gourgonnier. Plan was to leave after work today to go to Mas Carlot, but it’s 6pm and we just finished pressing the Sans Soufre Cuvee, so it made more sense to stay here tonight and do some laundry and head over there tomorrow. At this point all but the one small fermenter of vin de pays has been removed from it’s skins and pressed. Malolactic fermentation has begun for most of the reds, and finished for a few. I don’t know if I mentioned, but I am tremendously grateful to the Cartier family for giving me the opportunity to learn from them, and I will not soon forget my time here. I am looking forward to whatever tomorrow has in store for me.

Labeling day!

Woohoo, something new! So, since Gourgonnier sells their wine to several importers in the US, and since the wines going to each importer needs to bear a back label saying who it was imported by, the wines here are not labeled when they're bottled. They go into bottle and are stored in bins like this.








So when an order comes in, the machine gets all set up with labels. The label depends of course on which wine, but also on which importer. Today we did orders for Diyonysos Imorts in VA and for Michael Skurnik Wines in NY. Both orders were 2007 Rouge Tradition, but Dionysos likes the new labels, and Skurnik likes the old labels, so we did the first order (3,000 bottles labeled, boxed, and palletized in 2 hours) then we switched labels and did the other. Since we weren't bottling today I didn't get to see the whole machine in operation, but basically the way the whole thing works is, the wine is fed via hose to the bottling machine, which of course has bottles in it. There bottles are filled then fed to the corking station by conveyor belt, then via the same conveyor belt it gets a cap, there are two units that tighten the cap on the neck of the bottle, then it's transferred to a spinning platform where it gets the front label, then the back, then back onto the conveyor belt and out of the machine, where it's packed by hand. The full case then gets stuck through a unit that tapes it top and bottom, and the finished box gets a sticker bearing the name of the importer, and it goes on the pallet. And that's pretty much my whole day right there.

Oh, and for lunch we had cured ham. Yay!

Now that was a long day.

So, first thing yesterday I went to an old abbey with Eve and Luc. It's now a historical site where they also have art shows, so there was a photo expo inside too. A big chunk of the abbey has been destroyed, I don't know if by time or by war or by what, but most of it is still standing, including the tower, which is 26 meters high, and it's 126 steps to the top. I counted.
So, after the abbey and lunch, Eve and Yves and I loaded up the car and drove north for a birthday party for two friends of Eve's in the Ardeche region. On our way we passed a place called le Monde du Nougat (Nougat World). Apparently the Ardeche region used to make a lot of silk, and Eve's hippie friends live in an old silk factory. The birthday party had everything you could want, there was music and mutton and sumo wrestling and everything.










Oh, also, alcohol and marijuana. The beer on tap was Kwak, which is a Belgian beer that's 8% alcohol, and may explain partly why I'm having a bit of a hard time remembering the concentrating, remembering and spelling. Also, at some point during the evening somebody was walking around with a water bottle full of some unidentified cloudy booze, insisting that everybody try it. It tasted like kerosene filtered through a dirty gym sock, then flavored with artificial kiwi.










When we arrived at the party, just outside of a tiny, tiny village, there were 3 sheep in a pen just at the entrance to the designated parking area, which was designated by a couple of bright hand-painted signs on cardboard. We parked the car and were greeted by the birthday girl, Maude. The party was inside a little stone-walled courtyard. There were inflatable sumo suits and a sparring ring, a big canopy erected with counters underneath made out of pallets and two-by-six covered in fabric. At the far end there was a long table that was just starting to be loaded with food, and a long barbecue being lit. Yves and I chatted while Eve disappeared with Maude. It turns out Idiocracy is one of Yves' favorite movies. After a little while I took part in the sumo wrestling.









A large container of mutton appeared and the pieces were put on the barbecue. For a second I thought maybe I should go count the sheep again, but it was dark.









I met a friend of Eve's who's a winemaker in this area, and learned that Grenache, Syrah, Gamay, Viognier. It's not a very well known region in France, but he said the wine quality has improved dramatically over the past 10 years. He also told me that there's an American grape that goes by the name of Clinton here that ended up here when vines were brought over for root stock grafting, and he says some of the best wines from the area are from this grape. It was after my conversation with him that things started to get weird. The reggae band was replaced by a rap band. Apparently French hippies love American rap music. I couldn't understand the frontman well enough to tell if he was any good, but Yves said he wasn't great. It did sound like he was rhyming Ardeche with Ardeche an awful lot. Eventually they started just playing songs off of a cd, and the frontman was still on stage with a mic bouncing his hands in the air (like he just didn't care) and singing along when he could, which wasn't that often because it was American rap and he didn't seem to know many of the words.
Then Jerome, the winemaker I'd been talking to, suddenly had his shirt torn off for reasons I was never able to ascertain. Then the first award for Drunkest Guy at the Party went to a stumbling guy long black hair in a ponytail, who went onto the stage, then promptly dismounted, nearly taking a lighting tree with him. I pointed out to Yves that Ponytail was performing a valuable public service by being so drunk, thus letting me know that I'm not the drunkest one at the party, and I can keep drinking. The second award went to a guy who, earlier in the night, claimed I wasn't an American because I didn't know that Nirvana was why Seattle is famous. At least I think that was his line of reasoning. He won the award when, too drunk to stand, he sat on a barrel that was being used as a beer cooler, toppled it over, soaking himself and several people around him.
This morning when I woke up the first person I spoke to was Ponytail, who was trying to locate his pants, and who told me it was a good thing his girlfriend wasn't there because she'd freak out about him losing his pants. At least I think that's what he said, he was talking kind of fast, I don't think he realized I wasn't a native French speaker, since all I said was 'bonjour'.
After a breakfast of baguette, more mutton, jam and coffee, we broke down the tents and headed out. I didn't see the sheep in their pen when we drove by.